Having had one of their laptops and realizing how poorly constructed it is, I believe you should re-think it.

Besides, there is nothing stopping you from using their DE on any other PC.

I'm looking forward to their Virgo laptops, which will be designed and manufactured in-house instead of being rebadged Sager/Clevo laptops. If they're able to pair high-quality hardware with a high quality Linux desktop experience, I think a lot of developers will switch over.

Too late for me. The framework is doing everything I need and I hope that I never ever get to buy another full laptop.

I use their os on an old xps 13, and it's fully replaced ubuntu (I hate snaps!) as my go to distribution. It's pretty flawless.

I do hope they take the time to fully iron out the bugs on cosmic before making it the default. I was an early wayland adopter but after facing issue after issue, I eventually realized that the jump from xorg to wayland was all about making the developers life easier, with little to any benefit to me as an end user.

Yeah as I recall they simply buy a well known laptop from Asia and rebrand it (as a lot of other companies do), at least the first ones were not developed by them at all.

What does "from Asia" mean? All laptops I'm aware of are built in Asia.

I'll agree when PopShop doesn't take 800mb of ram idle in the background (it keeps the entire repo in memory instead of in a DB).

Genuine question, are any of the package manager "app store" style front ends actually nice to use right now? From my perspective having used several different distributions and environments over the course of the last ~15 years, they've all been "just ok" at best, very obviously webviews with some native chrome glued on, and had issues with resource usage, glitchy UI/UX, lagginess, etc.

Is it a matter of these particular bits not receive adequate attention or something else? I'm not opposed to trying to pitch in and help improve them but before that's feasible the root problem needs to be understood.

I've been using Solus 4.4 for a few days. Best package install experience I've had - one tool to do it, no weirdness or scary messages about dependencies, and the hit rate on getting the software I'm looking for without issues has been very high. Top notch desktop distro.

I think a lot of it is because distros tend to play hot potato with the packaging and try to reduce their load by building off Debian or Arch, which makes the experience way less consistent as you end up with fragmentation surfaced to the user. Add in a bit of corporate open-source "embrace the user" and you get app store jank that the developers never use because they just open a terminal instead.

Synaptic works great. Not super newbie friendly though.

Is there any legitimate reason for this? I also find it generally unresponsive and it lags hard inbetween searches and clicks. I mean I always update from terminal but for how they’re trying to develop the desktop experience I don’t get why it takes up so many resources despite being sluggish

All the work is done in the UI thread. They did some work on that, not sure if merged.

I'd fix it myself but it's all in Vala and I don't have time to learn another language.

My experience with System76 laptops has been mixed. Some of their models are great, many are fraught with issues.

I would definitely not buy one if you're not in North America as there's a decent chance you'll need hardware support.

I've had mixed luck as well.

Hardware (darter pro 7, everything maxed):

Recently, the keyboard and trackpad of my two-year-old laptop suddenly became a convex surface. Had to open a support ticket to ask how to get a replacement battery.

Many days later, I got a reply that it would be $120 + shipping and do I want to go ahead and order one? No advice on how to mitigate a potentially hazardous situation caused by their product and full retail price on replacing the defective part.

Pop!_OS:

Before I had actually moved into the laptop or installed anything (other than emacs and firefox), the package manager crapped itself with some circular dependency. As I started to work through unfucking the situation, it occurred to me this wasn't my fault and why am I putting up with this?

I got the new Pangolin12 a few months ago and it was a bit of a nightmare. USB-C with alt-dp was completely nonfunctional (the USB hardware would constantly reset and all my external storage would be unmounted and remounted and ethernet over USB-C would disconnect, making normal work impossible while docked). I went through three laptops and all of them had the same issue. The line from S76 was that there must be something wrong with my dock, though I tried three different docks, multiple linux distributions, and pretty much every kernel version available in Pop!_OS to no avail.

Kudos to them for working with me and for the support staff generally being friendly (and also putting up with 3 RMAs). I ended up just getting a refund though and buying an M2 Macbook Pro.

I think the major issue atm is that they're stuck working with second-string ODMs who aren't necessarily the highest quality but who will at least give them access to hardware documentation.

The designs for their most recent laptops are also freely and openly licensed, using the CERN Open Hardware License: https://github.com/system76/virgo/

Has there been any noise about when they hope to sell laptops based on those designs?

To my knowledge, we just have to guess based on the various development details that they have teased on Mastodon/twitter.